Is HeTexted.com taking crowdsourcing to a whole new level?

It’s a pretty common behavior for a group of girls to get together and discuss their love lives by sharing what their romantic interests have texted them or how they’ve acted around each other. This is an absolutely normal, and sometimes helpful, case especially when your girlfriends may have met the guy in question. The website HeTexted.com takes this familiar concept and turns it into a place for people to ask complete strangers to help decode text messages received. Is this a whole new level of crowdsourcing, or should you keep your personal life in your, well, personal world?

Don’t get us wrong, it’s not like people haven’t flocked to the Internet to ask random life questions to get the opinions of total strangers before. We’ve seen it happen in relationship forums, Yahoo! Answers, health blogs, et cetera. However, HeTexted.com bills itself as “the first Q&A service dedicated to dating questions” and we wonder how much of this advice can you trust? After all, how is someone supposed to give you dating opinions about people they’ve never met before? Are humans really that simple?

The site works like this: You screencap a text message you’re curious about and submit it to the site. When it’s published, the public has their opportunity to vote that the text means “he’s into you,” “he’s not into you,” or “verdict is still out” (whatever this means. Maybe they just think you should get out of the house). Members can also comment on the post to give their thoughts, or users can “Ask a bro” to get a male point of view on the subject. I gotta say, sifting through several of these post and I’m rather surprised how mature and sincere some of the advices are. Maybe this is an upgrade from the trolls on Yahoo! Answers after all. Some of it aren’t even about what he texted, but what he didn’t. Can’t live with ’em, can’t without!

It’s an incredibly addicting formula, because most people are just naturally curious and nosey about other people’s love lives to see if they bare any resemblance to their own issues (or just for drama’s sake). At the same time, it’s also universalizing women in our needy, helpless ways. If you’re resorting to a website to figure out your love life, maybe it’s better to just chalk it up with the man himself. You know, communicate like grown people do? HeTexted might provide a juicy glimpse into the messy world of dating but we’re still unsure about crowdsourcing advice for something so intimate.

In the meantime, it’s just so hard not to read into the texts some of these ladies get and have a facepalm moment, thanking all that’s right in the world this is not you. We’ll just leave you behind with this gem, but you can find so many more at the source.